he poet Weldon Kees was born in
Beatrice, Nebraska, on February 24, 1914. His work places him with
Robert Lowell,
Elizabeth Bishop,
John Berryman,
Kenneth
Rexroth, and other poets of their
generation. Kees's work is less well known. Yet he is at once a coterie
figure and a poet included in
Harold
Bloom's "canon." The reasons for this
start with how Kees saw himself when his first book, The Last Man
(1943), was published. In a letter to his friend and editor, Norris Getty
(of Waco, Nebraska), he felt more comfortable with the modernism of the
past and the effect of his disassociation still contributes to the problem
of where he figures in American poetry:

I must say I feel too little sense of "belonging" with my
immediate contemporaries, with the exception of four or five guys. It's so
easy, don't you think, to feel a sense of identification with the men of
the Pound-Eliot generation, or even the Hart Crane-Tate-Horace Gregory
generation, rather than the present gang, with its Rukeysers and Shapiros
and John Frederick Nimses.

Kees was born to Sarah and John Kees, the owner of a hardware factory
in Beatrice. Their son showed a precocious interest in writing, piano, and
art. In the 1920s, while still a boy, he published his own movie
magazines, which he filled with stories, poems, and facts about his
favorite Hollywood stars. The early influence of motion pictures can be
seen in poems like "Subtitle" and in the closure of "1926"
(MP3), Kees's
autobiographical poem, in which he returned to an autumn evening on North
5th Street in Beatrice to see that everything that was going to happen was
already present in the idyllic small town of his youth:

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.

One of Kees's playmates was Spangler Arlington Brugh, better
known as the actor Robert Taylor, whom he followed to
Doane College in
1931. Kees, in search of courses in creative writing, went on to the
University of Missouri, and finally found a literary circle around Lowry
C Wimberly, the editor of
Prairie Schooner
and an English
professor at the
University of Nebraska,
from which Kees graduated in
1935. Like many young writers in the 30s, Kees wanted to be the next
Hemingway,
Wolfe, or
Faulkner.
This romantic and American aspiration,
however, eluded him. He wrote several novels, which were considered
promising by the editors who sent them back because of their lack of
"uplift" and outré content. He had more success with his
short fiction and published over forty short stories from 1934 to 1945.
Kees began to write poetry seriously at about the time that he started
working for the Federal Writers' Project in Lincoln, where he met Norris
Getty. With Getty for a reader, Kees rapidly matured as a poet and became
widely published during the last years of the Depression. Kees lived in
Denver from 1937 to 1943. There he married Ann Swan, who would be his
helpmate through most of his literary career. By the time the Second World
War broke out, Kees had already visited New York and made important
connections to the literary operators behind The Partisan Review,
New Directions, and the like. When Knopf rejected his novel Fall
Quarter, Kees, in 1942, for the most part abandoned fiction.

Fearing he would soon be drafted, Kees relocated to New York in 1943.
What he thought would be a temporary stay lasted until 1950. While living
in New York, and later in Brooklyn, Kees wrote for Time Magazine and
Paramount's newsreel service, and published numerous reviews in The New
York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The New Republic, many
of which are collected in
Reviews and Essays, 1936-55 (1988). Kees
took up painting and figured in the establishment of the Abstract
Expressionist movement and he published his second volume of poems, The
Fall of Magicians (1947), which included "Robinson"
(MP3), the
first of four persona poems that featured Kees's New Yorker Man,three of which first appeared in that magazine:

The dog stops barking after Robinson has
gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way.

The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.

Which is all of the room walls, curtains,
Shelves, bed, the tinted photograph of Robinson's first wife,
Rugs, vases panatelas in a humidor.
They would fill the room if Robinson came in.

The pages in the books are blank,
The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair,
Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here.

All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Calling. It never rings when he is here.

Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday.

Robinson expresses the estrangement Kees felt with his life in
New York, an estrangement that could not be ameliorated by his summers in
Provincetown's art colony. In October 1950, Weldon and Ann Kees drove
cross-country to San Francisco. There, Kees collaborated on behavioral
science films with the anthropologist Gregory Bateson and the book
Nonverbal Communication (1956) with the psychologist Jurgen Ruesch.
He also made art films, continued to paint and exhibit, and write poems.
When his last book, Poems 1947-1954 (1954), was published, Kees had
divorced Ann, become dependent on amphetamines, and entered into many
different "cultural ventures," including a film review program on radio,
which featured Pauline Kael; a literary-bohemian stage review, Poets
Follies; a film company, for which he wrote screenplays; a theatrical
enterprise that entailed restoring a theater and writing plays; and
numerous collaborations with Bay Area jazz and blues musicians. Despite
his efforts to extend the Jazz Age Bohemia and Avant Garde of the 20s and
recreate the enchantment that movies had given him in his youth Kees was
overwhelmed by depression during June and July 1955. He told a friend that
he wanted to start a new life in Mexico, a land that fascinated him
because
Hart Crane,
Malcolm
Lowry, and other writers had found there an
escape from America. Kees also told the same friend that he had also tried
to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, the place where his car was found on
July 18.

Save for a few anthology appearances, the three editions of
The Collected Poems of
Weldon Kees (1960, 1962, and 1975), with its
introduction by Donald Justice, have preserved Kees's reputation. Since
1983, however, his life and work has enjoyed a reclamation.
Columbia
(1983), the literary journal of Columbia University,
issued the first selection of Kees's fiction. It was followed by
The Ceremony and Other Stories (1984),
selected by Dana Gioia.
Weldon Kees: A Critical Introduction
(1985) featured essays about Kees and a
bibliography by Bob Niemi. Kees's letters were gathered together by Robert
E Knoll in
Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation (1986).
Reviews and Essays, 1936-55 (1988), edited by
James Reidel,
with an introduction by Kees's friend,
Howard Nemerov, presents Kees as a reviewer
and cultural critic. Mr Reidel also edited and introduced Kees's academic
comedy, the novel
Fall Quarter (1990) and helped the Watershed
Foundation produce Land's End (1992), rare archival recordings of
Kees reading his poetry.

Kees's reputation has also flourished abroad. In 1993, BBC2's Bookmark
program aired Looking for Robinson, a documentary by Daisy Goodwin,
in which the English poet Simon Armitage traveled across the United States
in a kind of road movie rediscovery of Kees's world in New York,
Beatrice, Lincoln, and San Francisco. Kees has also found an audience
in the Netherlands  perhaps because of his Dutch-sounding name  where his
poetry has been translated and placed on the World Wide Web at various
times.

Presently, a biography by James Reidel is being prepared for publication in
the near future.
The University of Iowa will sponsor an NEH-funded symposium on Kees and an
exhibit of his paintings. The head of the Kees project, Dr Stephen C
Foster of the University of Iowa's
Program
for Modern Studies, will edit a
companion monograph that will include contributions by several scholars.
Also at Iowa, the
Windover Press
at the
Center for the Book
will print a chapbook of previously unpublished Kees poems.